24 thoughts on “In which voice chat leads to revelations”

Being a boring American-English speaker where the only accent I have is in how I pronounce Chicago, I love hearing my EU guildmates talk. Accents and slightly different pronounciations are so refreshing.

There are different ways of saying Chicago? :D
I thought I would chime in while I too am a member of the US-born, EU-bred WoW-playing fiends… I can only concur with Ravious. Listening to Cockney accents whilst beating the stuffing outta raid bosses INCREASES my enjoyment of the game 1000fold :D
We had a young lady from Scotland though, I just couldn’t understand a word she said. We speak the same language?

I think my favorite it how a friend of mine always pronounces the EQ2 “Thundering Steppes” zone as “Thundering Steeps.” Or friends who, back when we played SWG, always pronounced “scythe” as “sky-th.”

There are multiple ways to pronounce pyrite? Who knew?

And @Salvaenus — I grew up in Chicago and while there’s only 1 “official” pronunciation, yeah… you hear it said many different ways over time. One of the suburbs actually has a law on how to pronounce its name. “Joliet” is “joe-lee-eht” and *not* “jolly-et.” Somehow I don’t think that law’s ever actually been enforced, but it’s on the books. . . .

Meridian 59 had these issues before voice chat. Players who meet me offline often ask me how to pronounce different names in the game. The trickiest one was the town name of “Barloque”, which the developers I worked with pronounced as “bar-LOAK” but others pronounced it “bar-lo-KAY”.

I once had a priest named Kalya. 90% of the people in my guild called me Kayla. Eventually it became an in-joke and they’d do it on purpose just to make me angry. One of the reasons I left that guild.

I think it’s funny when not even the developers can agree how to pronounce their own words. At Blizzcon, I don’t think any two people pronounced “draenei” the same way. I abhor the “drain-eye” pronunciation, and stick with the one the narrator uses when you first create one.

I never did vent, since I played FFXI on PS2 mostly. That game had tongue twisters, Any mithra NPC had names like Meh Chotsileko or something, and I don’t think anyone agreed on how to pronounce they apostrophe names like Vana’Diel, Kamn’Laut or ix’Aern.

TOR will probably follow The KOTOR trend and make most of the characters speak with upper-class british accents except for the rough and tumble ones like smugglers and bounty hunters.

I have yet to hear anyone add an “r” into the Azerothian equivalent of “Washington”. That makes me happy. (I can understand different vowel pronunciations since there aren’t any real rules to them, and even dropping letters since we’ve coopted several French words, but *adding* letters that *aren’t there* always hits my nerve centers like fingernails on a chalkboard. It’s *not* “Warshington”, people.)

See, that’s another of those “vowels have stupid rules” words. The “u” used without any accompanying vowels should be pronounced the same way in both places. We just don’t expect the two to have different sounds in that usage.

At some point, I really have to wonder how much of it is just bad writing that is ignorant of common usage (“let’s do a fantasy name by jamming on the keyboard”), and how much of is it just the stupidity of common usage. *shrug*